Recursive Worldly Fables

The epilogue reflects on the events and phenomenon documented in the preceding chapters as an account of the history that underlies a contemporary situation in which Chinese contemporary art has achieved wide global recognition and culture and creativity have become modes of governmentality. It argues for the importance of feminist sightlines opened by ethnographic inquiry into the work of art underlying landmark events and exhibits. The posthumous return of a painting by Li Tianpian in one by male counterpart Wang Xingwei reveals persistent hierarchies and the possibility of radical difference, of differential historiographical consciousness, of imagining a world that is not hierarchically structured by social abstractions and markings. A concluding reflection on RMB City, an online interactive piece by multi- media artist Cao Fei, speculatively enters its open-ended theatricalization of the Chinese global city as an always-already uneven and gendered timespace.